If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

When the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid suffered from sleeplessness, which was all too often, he did what any sensible caliph would do: he summoned Masrur, his favourite executioner. As readers of The ...

Reading the publisher's blurb for this novel, I'm disappointed. It promises an 'exciting new departure' from Maggie O'Farrell's previous work, the best book you'll read all year, and so on. 'Exciting' ...

If novels are going to be as rich in reference as Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, I do think the publishers should be encouraged to add optional reading lists at the end. Fludd is a funny, exquisitely written ...

Memories, memories, ah, fond memories! Flicking rapidly through the above-mentioned tome for the purposes of this review, I could not help but recall those golden days in the early Seventies – or was ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...

JOHN BIERMAN IS a journalist and military historian with a knack for turning complicated events into gripping narratives. His short biography of the Hungarian explorer Laszlo Almasy is no exception.

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

John Barrow has been called the father of Arctic exploration. ‘In fact,’ says Fergus Fleming firmly in his jolly new book, ‘he was the father of global exploration.’ Barrow was appointed Second ...

It is a brave, some might say foolish writer who embarks on a history of the English Civil War these days. The grand historical narratives of the war that raged from 1642 to 1649, written by the likes ...

IF ANYONE EVER doubted (and some certainly have) that the twentieth century underwent a major revolution in the arts and ideas that merits the generic name of Modernism, and so parallels the other ...